[gpm]TouchPad and gpm--success after problems

[Tuukka Toivonen]

First of all I got gpm running, so I'm not asking anything. Just thought
that maybe someone would like to hear my experiences.

I have Acer Travelmate 332T with Synaptics Touchpad revision 4.6. I'm
running Debian Woody on it. The Touchpad appears to support all advanced
functions mentioned in the Synaptics manual (two-finger detect, sleep, etc)

The Touchpad worked with PS/2 driver, with either X or gpm, althought it
was sometimes left in "Absolute" mode after my experiences. Running
tpconfig -x at startup cured this.

Since the device has 4 buttons, of which only 2 were usable with the PS/2
driver, I was much missing the middle button. However, the stock Debian gpm
(patched 1.19.6) didn't work at all with synps2 driver: it loaded but did
not much else.

With gpm compiled from unpatched gpm-1.19.6 sources, it was much better. I
got the mouse movements working fine. However, a left button click appeared
as right button click (with gpm or X running with the mouse repeater) and
other buttons did nothing. I skimmed the code but couldn't find obvious
problems...

Anyway, I noticed that gpm had support for wmode in the source.
Since I knew wmode was necessary for the middle button, I enabled it and
tried again. And then it started working perfectly, with both gpm and X!
The left, right and middle buttons work just fine.

I still edited the source a bit: the limits for automatic edge movement
were a bit biased to the pad center, so I enlargened them. Would be nice to
have these configurable.

The conclusion: to get the middle button working, download gpm sources,
extract them, edit file synaptics.c changing line
	static int use_wmode                 = 0;
to
	static int use_wmode                 = 1;
compile, install, set up mouse repeater for X, and it works fine.

By the way, mev didn't work with kernel 2.4.18 (with devfs). And there
isn't rmev at all even if gpm.info says so. And texinfo documents didn't
compile with Woody (sorry, I don't have exact error messages here--but I
can send them later if someone is interested).

[I'm not on gpm mailing list--please keep me in the CC. And I'm willing to
test gpm if someone wants]